Paper short abstract:

Technological development initiates uncertainty, and it becomes essential to engage the public at an early stage of this development. The ongoing development of ELMs seeks to map the public’s sensibilities through an approach of phenomenology and futurism to inform this development.

Paper long abstract:

There has been a growing interest in the field of mycelium-based materials and recent advances in this field seek to develop programmable living material exhibiting intrinsic properties of living systems such as self-repair, growth, and environmental sensing. This new class of advanced material is known as Engineered Living Materials (ELMs). Scientific and technological developments as such actuates greater uncertainty and it becomes essential to understand the public and their issues from an early stage, which otherwise can lead into a controversy. There have been assumptions that technology is accepted unquestionably unless they pose any appreciable risk to health and safety. As seen in the case of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), the public brought forward strong and justifiable options about what they consumed and how it was grown. Controversy mapping is therefore seen as an appropriate tool for technologies which is not black boxed yet and has to go through social pressures and demand to accommodate itself to the social environment, but it also becomes challenging for a technology that is still at a very early phase of development and the public unaware of it. We therefore formulate a method ‘Mapping Sensibilities’ informed by the approach of ‘phenomenology’ and ‘futurism’. Through a participatory workshop we engage the public on ‘making sense on living with a material that is alive’. We conceptualize this workshop based on Simondon’s ‘mode of existence of technical objects’ where technical objects seems to adjust to its particular milieu (set of relations) in the course of its individuation.